31 December 2010

In 2010 I started cycling in earnest. Last December, when I got a bike fitting
consultation, Piaw suggested that I advise Terry Shaw that I just
wanted to be able to ride from the south bay to the coast and back in a day
(depending on how you do it, this is about 70 miles and 7,000 feet of
climb— but under any scenario, far, far longer than any ride I had done up to that time). To
which my reaction was, Ha ha, very funny, but OK, that's what I'll say.
By April— four months later— I had done exactly that. In June I
finished the Sequoia Century and set off for a cycle tour of the Alps, which
was the most incredible trip I've gone on in years. Now, I've logged about
2,700 miles and 150,000' of climb for the year, up from last year by at least a
factor of 10, I estimate. Between that and changing my diet a bit I feel substantially healthier. (It's hard to know which is primarily responsible, as I did not conduct a controlled experiment. Shame on me.)

In just a few months of not even particularly regimented training, I worked up
from having never really demonstrated any respectable amount of physical
endurance in my entire life, to doing a number of things that were previously,
for me, in Ha ha, very funny territory. Now, it's not like I have any unusual amount of willpower. It wasn't a New Year's
resolution that got me off my butt, but rather me deciding that I wanted to go back
and see Rosenlaui again. And I don't think I would have gotten there if I
didn't also happen to think cycling was so damned exhilirating, or if I didn't have a
bunch of friends who kept going with me on all these rides.

I guess the lesson is that if you are choosing your New Year's resolutions now,
or trying to make any sort of change in your life, you have to plan for the
fact that you will need more than sheer willpower to succeed.

I slogged through some parts of 2010, but I also got to do a lot of fun and
awesome things this year. Happy New Year, and best wishes to all for a
wonderful 2011.

Some recent things I have enjoyed but am not going to write full reviews
of:

Toys

Buckyballs
are really fun to play with. You wouldn't think that grown men and women could
entertain themselves for hours at a time playing with these magnets, but then
again, I didn't think so either. I think of it as intelligent play-doh.
Woot occasionally has them on sale at a discount of about 50%.

Rock Band 3. Perhaps the only video game I've enjoyed playing this
whole year. No major changes to gameplay, but they have really polished up the
game dynamics, and the setlist contains a much greater variety of styles. I
don't care much for the guitar, but playing the drums and exercising your coordination is just so satisfying in a strange physical way.

Food

I usually am satisfied with plain black tea but Canadian Ice Wine Tea is an interesting variation. Smells like wine, tastes like black tea. It's very fragrant but still subtle compared to most fruity teas (which I am not fond of).

I ordered some Ka-Pow! Coffee Bars from Sahagún.
It's like a chocolate bar, but made with coffee beans instead of cocoa beans. I
don't even drink coffee, but the taste and texture of these things is
incredibly bold, and hauntingly good.

Cooking

I've been cooking, mostly out of the following cookbooks:

The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook has recipes for pretty much all the staples of classic American cuisine. Also contains a lot of practical advice and tips (some of them apparently very nonstandard) for avoiding all the common pitfalls for each dish.

The New Moosewood Cookbook is the new edition of Mollie Katzen's classic vegetarian cookbook. The whole thing is hand-lettered(!) and whimsically illustrated. This is not a comprehensive reference like ATKFC or JoC, but it fills some of the gaps in the coverage of the ATKFC, particularly with respect to vegetarian dishes and more ethnic foods.

The Joy of Cooking is the very extensive classic. I refer to it when I want to make something specific that's not in another book, but its extensive use of indirection ("First, make Hollandaise Sauce as directed on page 355. Then, prepare the toast as directed on page 1180...") makes it a pain to follow.

I'm not much of a hardware geek, or a culinary geek, for that matter, but
the author of Cooking for Geeks (review) did talk me into buying
a laser
thermometer, which is super useful once you
have a grasp of the whole how to use temperature thing. Hardware-wise it's an interesting device too. It looks at the blackbody radiation being emitted by an object, so it can give you the surface temperature of an object from a distance and pretty much instantly. Indispensable especially in sautéing and roasting chops and steaks, but also has less exciting uses, like telling you whether soup is too hot to drink.

I apologize for the raft of posts coming up. I wanted to flush all my
buffers before the new year.

Buddha's Brain: the practical neuroscience of happiness, love, and
wisdom, by Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius,
is about contemplative practices like Tibetan Buddhism, and what scientists
have in recent years discovered about how they work at a neurological level.
(From fMRI studies it is pretty clear now that people who are good at
meditating are doing something very different with their brains from
what the rest of us do.)

Putting on my engineer hat, I would paraphrase the major assertions of this
book as follows. Evolution has optimized our brains not for happiness, but for
long-term survival. At first glance this is kind of a downer— what hope
could there be for sustained happiness, if it's not an end, but a means toward
an end? But just because a system is designed or optimized to do one thing does
not mean that it cannot be hacked to do another, if you understand its
principles of operation. Buddhism encompasses a huge variety of practices,
beliefs, and traditions, but among them, it gives you what I would call
tools to hack your own brain: to alleviate suffering, to become more
mindful, or in general to activate more wholesome and productive states of the
brain. Which is much (much) easier said than done, but this book gets
you started on that road and discusses the neurological basis for those
techniques as we understand them today.

Here's one example. For very good evolutionary reason, our brains are risk
averse: we naturally focus on, and give more weight to, the bad rather than the
good. Moreover, it's now understood that neuronal associations become stronger
the more they are activated. This induces a feedback phenomenon ("positive"
feedback, ha ha) that can be quite dangerous, because of the negativity bias.
It can manifest as, for example, the feeling of being consumed by anger, or of
debilitating anxiety. And that feedback phenomenon is why it's so important to
actively interrupt negative trains of thought (and, when possible, to actively
bring to mind any positive aspects that are available) rather than indulging in
them. Doing so not only alleviates suffering in the present, but also actually
rewires your brain to reduce your future predisposition towards those kinds of
unproductive thoughts. If you follow Buddhist teachings you will recognize this
is as the Right Effort of the Eightfold Path: cultivating wholesome thoughts
while weeding out the harmful ones.

In this and a variety of other contexts the authors help you to understand
some of the brain's evolutionarily adaptive but potentially unproductive
tendencies. (I found the discussion of the brain's capacity for simulation, and
why it can lead to suffering, to be particularly interesting.) In some cases a
mere awareness of the phenomenon goes a long way in being able to counteract
it, so the payoff is near immediate. In other cases it takes a substantial
amount of time and effort to stop old habits and access more desirable states of
brain/mind. The assertion is that as with other skill, you too can practice in
order to learn to be more loving, kind, level-headed, mindful, and happy.

The book is written in a casual and accessible style, and is a moderately
easy read. A number of guided meditations and exercises are provided. The
authors do discuss a fair amount of neuroscience/biochemistry, only some of
which is directly relevant to a practical understanding or to the techniques.
Many of those parts can be safely skimmed (though some are very interesting),
so you can treat this book as a purely practical guide if you like.

The premise that we have subtantial power to effect physical changes in our
own brains, to become happier and healthier people— and using nothing
more than our own minds— is extremely interesting. It's not about putting
a happy face on everything but it is about helping yourself to take control of
your mind.

It isn't for everyone— the author has a twisted sense of humor, and there is a lot of sexual and morbid humor. But the comics are just incredibly rich in their stories, and demand repeated readings. The author loves to take a cliché and turn it on its head. The artwork is also very impressive for a webcomic; it comes in a variety of styles, from very minimal figures to rich watercolors, and even spot-on parodies of other comics and other visual media. All in all the book is a lot of fun to flip through. It will probably stay on my coffee table for a long time.

22 December 2010

Tron: Legacy was an entertaining and enjoyable movie (one of the most visually and aurally stimulating movies since Speed Racer, which I mean as a compliment, honestly), but mostly I think it worth mentioning because I believe the filmmakers should win some sort of award for Not Totally Outrageous Use Of Unix In A Hollywood Movie.

As I've been cooking more recently and learning about the mechanics of cooking
(that is, how to decipher cookbooks and follow instructions), I've found myself
wanting something of a primer on the theory of cooking. And I think
Jeff Potter's Cooking for Geeks is more or less what I've been looking for.

What I mean by theory of cooking is that I'd like to have better
mental models about, among other things, what makes dishes taste good; when
to use different kinds of heat, and in what amounts; and how to choose
complementary ingredients so I can make reasonable dishes without following
recipes. What it is, in a general sense, that makes dishes turn out the way
they do.

Cooking for Geeks covers a lot of ground. I think the most valuable
material for me was learning how to use different kinds of heat (e.g. boiling
vs. pan-frying vs. baking) to obtain various tastes and textures. To a large
degree, controlling taste and texture is a matter of controlling which
chemical reactions occur in the food. The major way you can influence those
is by changing the temperature; you just need to understand the temperature
ranges of different cooking media and the temperature ranges at which certain
desirable chemical reactions happen in your food, e.g. the Maillard
reaction.

There are also sections in the book on choosing tastes and ingredients,
baking, chemistry, and kitchen hardware hacking. The author has a lot of
specific tips but also helps you to understand the physical, biochemical,
agricultural, or physiological principles that are your basis for making
various choices in the kitchen. In addition, there are recipes, trivia,
interviews, and reference material sprinkled throughout the book.

Cooking
for Geeks is a useful book to have around when you plan meals. Recommended, provided you can handle analogies between cooking
and programming.

Disclosure

I'm a software engineer at DNAnexus, Inc. This blog represents the opinion of myself and no one else.Unless specifically noted otherwise, I do not receive free review copies of books or other products mentioned here.